Re: EGL to become Eclipse project

Den 23/06/10 01.25, James Perkins skrev:

Documentation? Have you looked at most RPG programs ;-)

Interesting read though. I agree to a point, but I do think there is a time
when rewriting is the right move. I think procedural programming differs
from OO programming in the decision to a point as well. Procedural
programming for me is harder to read. Nested if statements with 50 lines
between the initial if/endif is hard to read no matter how well it's
documented. Stuff like that should be rewritten.

For an OO example if you have some kind of custom ORM solution, rewriting
for JPA makes more sense to me.

Also, if there is a GOTO anywhere in the program, rewrite the whole thing.
Okay, that's more of a joke, but that's how I feel when I see a GOTO. :-)

Yes, there is a time for a complete rewrite but the expense in throwing away the knowledge embedded in the current source is much higher than most people think.

Hence, the movement for refactoring in especially the Java world, where a refactoring uses well-understood, small steps to transform the source into something equivalent but "better". This keeps the knowledge but leaves the source in a better state than you found it. Most of the steps are quite tedious unless you have good tooling support. Like renaming a variable, requires all usages to be found and changed. Tedious, but Eclipse can do it for Java. Can the recent versions of RDi (or whatever it is called this week) do the same for RPG?